British Balance of Competence Reviews, Part III: More reform than renegotiation or repatriation. EPIN [Working] Paper No. 42/December 2014. [see Abstract for I and II]

This paper, the third in a series for a CEPS project on the ‘The British Question’, is pegged on an ambitious exercise by the British government to review all the competences of the European Union on the basis of evidence submitted by independent stakeholders. The reviews considered in this paper cover the following EU policies: the single market for services, financial markets, the free movement of people, cohesion, energy, agriculture, fisheries, competition, social and employment policies, and fundamental rights. The declared objective of Prime Minister Cameron is to secure a ‘new settlement’ between the UK and the EU. From political speeches in the UK one can identify three different types of possible demand: reform of EU policies, renegotiation of the UK’s specific terms of membership, and repatriation of competences from the EU back to the member states. As most of the reviews are now complete, three points are becoming increasingly clear: i) The reform agenda – past, present or future - concerns virtually every branch of EU policy, including several cases reviewed here that are central to stated UK economic interests. The argument that the EU is ‘unreformable’ is shown to be a myth. ii) The highly sensitive cases of immigration from the EU and social policies may translate into requests for renegotiation of specific conditions for the UK, but further large-scale opt-outs, as in the case of the euro and justice and home affairs, are implausible. iii) While demands for repatriation of EU competences are voiced in general terms in public debate in the UK, no specific proposals emerge from the evidence as regards competences at the level at which they are identified in the treaties, and there is no chance of achieving consensus for such ideas among member states. Michael Emerson and Steven Blockmans, “British Balance of Competence Reviews, Part I: ‘Competences about right, so far’”, CEPS/EPIN Working Paper No. 35, October 2013 (www.ceps.eu/book/british-balance-competence-reviews-part-i-%E2%80%98competences-about-right-so-far%E2%80%99)(http://aei.pitt.edu/45599/); Michael Emerson, Steven Blockmans, Steve Peers and Michael Wriglesworth, “British Balance of Competence Reviews, Part II: Again, a huge contradiction between the evidence and Eurosceptic populism”, CEPS/EPIN Working Paper No. 40, June 2014 (www.ceps.eu/book/british-balance-competence-reviews-part-ii-again-huge-contradiction-between-evidence-and-eurosc)(http://aei.pitt.edu/52452/).

(EU) friends: NGO cooperation and involvement across multi-level policy processes. IES Working Paper 1/2007

A growing body of research focuses on the expanding roles of NGOs in global and supranational governance. The research emphasizes the increasing number of participation patterns of NGOs in policymaking and cross-national cooperation. It has produced important insights into the evolving political role of NGOs and their growing involvement in governance. The focus on activities at a transnational level has, however, lead to the virtual exclusion of research on other levels of governance. It has not been possible to tell whether the locus of their political activity is shifting from the national to the transnational environment, or whether it is simply broadening. Missing from the literature is an examination of the variety of cooperative relationships, including those between NGOs, which impact policy involvement across different levels of governance. To bridge this gap, I address two key questions: 1) Is the strategy of cooperation among NGOs a common feature of social movement activity across levels of governance, and if so, what does the structure of cooperation look like? 2) What impact, if any, does cooperation have on the expanding political involvement of NGOS, both within and across levels of governance? Using data from an original survey of migrant and refugee organizations across much of Europe, I test several hypotheses that shed light on these issues. The findings broadly indicate that 1) Cooperation is a widely-used strategy across levels of governance, 2) Cooperation with specific sets of actors increases the likelihood of NGO involvement at different levels of governance. Specifically, cooperation with EU-level actors increases the likelihood of national-level involvement, and 3) NGOs are more likely to extend their involvement across a range of institutions if they cooperate with a broad range of actors.

Hanging Together, Falling Apart: Self-Understandings of German Society from 1800 to the Present. CES Germany & Europe Working Papers, No. 04.7 (Series 51), 1994

In recent years, interest in comtemporary conceptions and self-understandings of the social order has grown among historians, yet the field of an "intellectual history of society" is little expJored for modern Germany. This paper surveys the field and asks how Germans from the early modern era up to the present time of German reunification conceived of the social order they were building and living in, and it provides an overview of the developments of such major concepts as "estate" and "class," "community" and "society," "individual" and "mass," "state" and "nation." Three major points emerge as persistent and distinctive features of German social self-conception in the nineteenth cand twentieth centuries: the intellectual construction of dilemmas between social conformity and social fragmentation; the difficulties of conceiving of society as a plitical society; and the "futurization" of an idealized, utopian social roder of harmony that was hoped would one day replace the perceived social disintegration.

European Corporate Governance Reform and the German Party Paradox. CES Germany & Europe Working Papers, No. 03.1, 2003

This paper addresses the current discussion on links between party politics and production regimes. Why do German Social Democrats opt for more corporate governance liberalization than the CDU although, in terms of the distributional outcomes of such reforms, one would expect the situation to be reversed? I divide my analysis into three stages. First, I use the European Parliament’s crucial vote on the European takeover directive in July 2001 as a test case to show that the left-right dimension does indeed matter in corporate governance reform, beside cross-class and cross-party nation-based interests. In a second step, by analyzing the party positions in the main German corporate governance reforms in the 1990s, I show that the SPD and the CDU behave “paradoxically” in the sense that the SPD favored more corporate governance liberalization than the CDU, which protected the institutions of “Rhenish,” “organized” capitalism. This constellation occurred in the discussions on company disclosure, management accountability, the power of banks, network dissolution, and takeover regulation. Third, I offer two explanations for this paradoxical party behavior. The first explanation concerns the historical conversion of ideas. I show that trade unions and Social Democrats favored a high degree of capital organization in the Weimar Republic, but this ideological position was driven in new directions at two watersheds: one in the late 1940s, the other in the late 1950s. My second explanation lies in the importance of conflicts over managerial control, in which both employees and minority shareholders oppose managers, and in which increased shareholder power strengthens the position of works councils.

Digital workers by design? An example from the on-demand economy. CEPS Working Document No. 414/October 2015 Monday, 19 October 2015

Recent organisational and technological changes à la Uber have generated a new labour market fringe: a digital class of workers and contractors. In this paper we study the case of CoContest, a crowdsourcing platform for interior design. Our objective is to investigate how profitable this type of work can be, also from a cross-country perspective, and why professionals choose to supply work on such a platform. Given the low returns, one might expect to see a pattern of northern employer/southern contractor. Yet analysis reveals a more nuanced pattern, in which designers supply their work even if they live in Italy, which is a high-income country. For these designers work on CoContest can make sense if they are new to the labour market and face high entry barriers, although crowdsourcing does not offer them profitable employment full time. The case of Serbia, the second-largest supplier of designers, is different, however. As a result of differences in purchasing power, if the market grows experienced Serbian designers can expect to make a living from crowdsourced contracts.

Class myths and culture /

Mode of access: Internet.

Working people and their employers.

Mode of access: Internet.

Meeting Physical Activity Guidelines and Average Daily Steps in a Working Population

Purpose: The aims of this study were to investigate the relationships and agreement between average number of steps taken per day and compliance with Australian physical activity guidelines in a sample of working Australian adults. Methods: One hundred-eighty-five adults wore a pedometer and recorded the number of steps taken each day for 7 d. On the 8th day, they completed a self-report survey that asked about frequency and duration of different activities during the previous week. Results: The average number of steps per day was 8543 (standard deviation = 2466) for men (n = 74) and 9093 (2926) for women (n = 111; no significant difference). Just over half the men (53%) and 45% of the women met the current national physical activity guidelines (no significant difference). Average number of steps per day was higher in those who met the guidelines [9547 (2655), n = 89] than in those who did not [8220 (2702), n = 96; P

Network structures: Working differently and changing expectations

There is a growing need for innovative methods of dealing with complex, social problems. New types of collaborative efforts have emerged as a result of the inability of more traditional bureaucratic hierarchical arrangements such as departmental program, to resolve these problems. Network structures are one such arrangement that Is at the forefront of this movement. Although collaboration through network structures establishes an innovative response to dealing with social issues, there remains an expectation that outcomes and processes are based on traditional ways of working. It is necessary for practitioners and policy makers alike to begin to understand the realities of what can be expected from network structures in order to maximize the benefits of these unique mechanisms.